Saturday, April 26, 2014

Bearing false witness

A liar for Jesus

Michael Voris has made a career of being more Catholic than the pope. You'd think, however, that so religious a person would hesitate to break the commandment against bearing false witness. I daresay he thinks it's okay because his lies of in the service of his imagined savior. Yet I wonder: How effective can the lies be when they are so transparent. In one of his typical rants, Voris castigates the president on the occasion of Obama's visit to the Vatican and an audience with the pope. Voris would have us believe that Obama wilted under the pontiff's glowering disapproval.

[T]he pope is the leader of the church militant and there is no more powerful organization on earth than the Catholic Church. Only it can consign the diabolical to the furnaces of hell. Perhaps that's why, when the pope encounters one of hell's agents, he doesn't have much of a smile on his face.... [The pope] doesn't like being a prop, especially for political leaders advancing evil, and his usual ebullient smile was missing from all the official photos, sending a clear message.

In a word, Voris's statement is untrue. The official photographs are readily viewed on the Vatican website. It does not take too long while scrolling through the voluminous archive of images to discover that Pope Francis managed to smile several times in the presence of our evil president and even while greeting Secretary of State John Kerry (often denounced by arch-Catholics for being a pro-choice member of the Church). See for yourself how readily Voris is refuted:

Testimonials

I consistently come away in awe of how eloquently you write, and how you make choosing exactly the right word seem so effortless. You also seem to find subject matter in a wide variety of places, and you link contemporary and long-past events in unexpected ways.